Midway through the campaign for the September 13 parliamentary election in Norway, the Right decided that enough was enough. For several years, the Red Party (Rødt) had been consistently polling above the electoral threshold of 4 percent. Beating this score would mean a breakthrough for the radical left in Norway not seen since the euphoric advances that followed 1945. Not only would the Red Party’s single MP Bjørnar Moxnes be joined by somewhere between seven and eleven comrades in Parliament — the Red Party’s breaking this threshold would also spell the end of prime minister Erna Solberg’s right-wing government. Little wonder Norway’s billionaires panicked.

So, the Right did what they always do. Their coffers filled with donations from the super-rich, they rallied their newspapers, their parties, and their think tanks in a familiar “red scare” campaign aiming to brand the Red Party as supporters of Stalinist genocide and Communist dictatorship.

In a dismal bid for attention, billionaire Stein Erik Hagen — the biggest financial contributor to the Norwegian right — offered all the Red Party’s voters one-way tickets to North Korea. In a short propaganda video, Bård Larsen of the think tank Civita (funded by Hagen) drew ideological comparisons between the Red Party and right-wing authoritarians such as Donald Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Far-right populist leader Sylvi Listhaug (also funded by Hagen) centered her entire campaign on stopping “the radical socialists” of the Green Party, the Socialist Left Party (SV), and the Red Party — claiming she wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if the Red Party gained any form of political influence. An MP for the traditional conservative party Høyre (funded, again, by Hagen) claimed that the Red Party was “just as bad as Nazism.” And so on and so forth, for weeks on end.